Tag / Olympics

by Andrew Pilcher

Nine nine nine

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And this one is a lot of story threads being joined together and becoming something else entirely. Obviously this is a left over from the Olympics, but it was also going to be used to herald a big change to the strip as well, which has now been postponed until after the millennial celebrations of Strip 1,000 on Monday.

Don’t worry, it’s not a big fundamental change like what has been happening to Girth over the past few weeks. Instead I’ll be making a popular occasional character a regular, something I’ve been working up to for a couple of years now…

All will be revelaed in a couple of weeks’ time…

by Andrew Pilcher

Hammer toss

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by Andrew Pilcher

Lawn Tennis

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That’s one of our Hastings fishing boats in the final panel. The real boat is pictured to the right. Photo by Tony Bates. Buy a canvas print here.

by Andrew Pilcher

100m dash

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I had an accident with a bottle of Dr Pepper and a graphics tablet on the Sunday I drew this. It completely fritzed my graphics tablet and left me with no means to colour the strip so this black and white version had to be posted instead.

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It ended up looking a lot better than I expected, but Jones and Smudge look undentical unless they’re coloured, so I don’t think I’ll ever be reverting to black and white, no matter how much time it may save.

I thought this was going to be a fairly standard joke about Scrumpy’s ears, so I wasn’t ready for the response it got. It appears that on the same day this was published, Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas beat Allyson Felix of the USA in the 400m track event in the most unusual fashion – she dived over the line. If the winner of the race is the first person to get a bodypart over the line, both Scrumpy and Shaunae won fair and square. In my opinion it’s just as valid as dipping at the line, and everyone does that.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Swimming

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Yes, the butterfly is a Monarch – or as I thought when I found a reference photo on Google Images, a generic red butterfly. It turns out that it’s been blown a good 3,000 miles off course.  I should have gone for one of these instead, a Red Admiral.

I was sorely tempted to colour the water in the pool an opaque green colour, to match the diving pool in Rio, but in the end I stuck to the more typical livid turquoise. Look at that pool. Are you supposed to dive in it or play hockey on it?

by Andrew Pilcher

Fencing

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As they say on the game show Catchphrase, say what you see.

by Andrew Pilcher

High Jump

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The 2016 Olympics have started in Rio, and once again the cats are holding the backyard Olympics in the garden. It’s useful to have a set subject to write about sometimes. It’s also good to have any other sport than football to write about – I ignored the European Cup completely this year. So, it turned out, did the England team.

Who knew we were going to do so well this year? I was fully expecting us to have the hubris Olympics this time round, turning up expecting to get all the medals after our performance in the London Olympics and then choking on everyone of them. I was very glad to be proved wrong. Of course, half the Russian squad being in rehab helped, but even so…